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Junji Ito

The Manga Review, 11/4/22

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This week’s biggest news story: Kadokawa has purchased Anime News Network. On November 1st, publisher Christopher MacDonald posted an open letter to ANN’s readership to reassure them that the site’s “editorial independence is contractually guaranteed,” and explain that the biggest changes would be in the site itself, not the content. “KWE will be investing significantly in ANN’s software development,” he noted. “A number of new projects will be launched, and a number of projects that have been stuck in development for way too long will be prioritized.” As expected, reader reactions were mixed, with some posting congratulations, and others voicing skepticism about having a major Japanese publisher as a corporate parent. “Yeah, gonna be tough to trust reviews for Kadokawa stuff now,” opined user Albion Hero. “You can say all you want about ‘we will keep our independence’ but its [sic] been long proven that companies that own sites and magazines don’t like those reviews to be critical of their products… Seen this same song and dance plenty of times in gaming media. All the staff say how good their new corporate overlords are, and how they will keep their independence and all. Then 2 years later all the staff is gone and the site no longer has their original integrity.” They concluded: “Would love to be proven wrong but I’ve seen this story too many times.”

NEWS AND VIEWS

Earlier this week, Seven Seas unveiled a fresh crop of licenses, among them Homonculus, a horror series from the creator of Ichi the Killer; Soara and the House of Monsters, a fantasy manga; and Cat on the Hero’s Lap, a comedy about a warrior whose efforts to save his homeland from destruction are thwarted by a cute cat. [Seven Seas]

In other licensing news, Azuki announced two new acquisitions: BLITZ, a sports manga set in the world of competitive chess, and Zombie Makeout Club, a horror manga about–you guessed it–a teenage zombie. [Azuki]

The October 2022 NPD Bookscan numbers are in, and once again Spy x Family, My Hero Academia, and Chainsaw Man dominated the Top 20 Adult Graphic Novels chart. [ICv2]

Bill Curtis posts a complete list of manga and light novels scheduled for a November 2022 release. [Yatta Tachi]

If you’re an avid sports manga enthusiast, you’ll want to check out the newly launched Sports Baka substack, where you’ll find essays on Hajime no Ippo, Dive!!, Days, Ryman’s Club and more. [Sports Baka]

The Manga Mavericks dedicate their latest episode to Red Sprite, a Shonen Jump title from 2019. [Manga Mavericks]

On the latest episode of Shojo & Tell, Ashley and Asher critique Skull-Faced Bookseller Honda-san. [Shojo & Tell]

Walt Richardson and Emily Myers dissect the October 2022 issue of Shonen Jump. [Multiversity Manga Club]

In keeping with the Halloween spirit, Gee and Ray explore the highs and lows of Junji Ito‘s extensive catalog. [Read Right to Left]

Parents, teachers, and librarians interested in learning more about yokai manga will find Brigid Alverson’s latest article for the School Library Journal a helpful resource; not only does she delve into the history of the genre, she also compiles a list of age-appropriate titles for kids, tweens, and teens. [School Library Journal]

Over at TCJ, Ritesh Babu and Ari Gardner interview Juan Albarran, a Spanish artist who’s currently working with Shoji Fujimoto on Matagi Gunner, a seinen action series about “an elderly rural hunter who proves unexpectedly skilled at video game first-person shooters, and soon becomes embroiled in the colorful world of e-gaming.” [The Comics Journal]

Max explains how BL manga such as Go For It, Nakamura! offered him an alternative model of masculinity. “I could be kind, thoughtful, and cute like the boys in BL anime and manga,” he notes. “Maybe some people wouldn’t understand, but I’d always have BL to reassure me that there was nothing wrong with me, and that it was okay to be myself.” [Anime Feminist]

REVIEWS

It’s a measure of how mainstream Hayao Miyazaki’s work has become that both the New York Times and the New Yorker commissioned reviews of Shuna’s Journey, available in English for the first time this month. Writing for the Times, Susan Napier declares Shuna’s Journey “eerie, enchanting, and surpassingly strange,” while Sam Thielman observes that “Shuna’s Journey moves and surprises because of the reader’s disorientation at being dropped into a world that is both generously detailed and miserly with explanations.”

New and Noteworthy

Complete and Ongoing Series

The Manga Review, 10/28/22

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Over the last year, The Comics Journal has been translating essays by prolific manga critic Natsume Fusanosuke. The topics have run the gamut from Taiyo Matsumoto’s distinctive visual style to the enduring appeal of Sazae-san and Rumiko Takahashi’s role in bringing romance to shonen manga. The latest installment focuses on Miyaya Kazuhiko, a key figure in the gekiga movement who’s not particularly well known to Western readers. In their helpful introduction, translators John Holt and Teppei Fukuda compare Natsume’s essay to Tatsumi Yoshihiro’s A Drifting Life, arguing that both Yoshihiro and Natsume write their “autobiograph[ies] as a history of gekiga. For Natsume, Miyaya’s gekiga form the pivotal ‘chapters’ in his own life as a ‘manga youth’ (manga seinen), coming of age in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s.” That’s a helpful way of understanding the essay’s mixture of self-reflection and analysis; Natsume uses his personal experiences to show the reader what Miyaya’s work meant to Japanese readers during a period of immense social, cultural, and technological change.

NEWS AND VIEWS

Seven Seas announced that it will be publishing LUPIN III (Lupin the Third): Thick as Thieves – Classic Manga Collection, “a curated collection of some of Monkey Punch’s best stories and chapters of Lupin III from throughout the classic manga’s history.” The book will be available in digital and hardcover editions next summer. [Seven Seas]

If you missed the first issue of Glaeolia, fear not: Glacier Bay Books is currently raising money for a reprint. (N.B. The crowdfundr page is not yet accepting pledges; the site should go live this weekend.) [Glacier Bay Books]

Jocelyne Allen sings the praises of Japanese SF Comics, a collection of sci-fi stories by Keiko Takamiya, Osamu Tezuka, and Junko Sasaki. Someone license this, please! [Brain vs. Book]

Found on Twitter: Kiuchi Niboro’s manga memoir about his time in a Soviet POW camp. It’s a fascinating look at a forgotten chapter of World War II history. [tara_chara]

What does Space Brothers have in common with M*A*S*H? The Mangasplainers are big fans of both, and divide their latest episode between a discussion of Chuya Koyama’s sci-fi drama and a discussion of the beloved seventies sitcom. [Mangasplaining… er, M*A*S*Hsplaining]

Tom and Joe, a.k.a. the Anime Sickos, sit down with one of Twitter’s most popular manga influencers, Minovsky Article. [Anime Sickos]

The Manga Machinations crew dedicate their latest podcast to Franken Fran, Wonderland, and Muhyo & Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation. [Manga Machinations]

Scholar Kathryn Hemmann explores the relationship between dojinshi and Western zine culture, drawing on their own experiences “both as an indie zine maker and as someone who has participated in big anthology fanzines.” [WWAC]

REVIEWS

In keeping with the spirit of Halloween, this week’s featured review analyzes Junji Ito’s Black Paradox, just out from VIZ. Christoper Farris argues that the book isn’t “especially ‘scary’ in a traditional sense, noting that “[t]here aren’t a lot of page-turn jump-scares included, and even the idea of gnawing, anxious dread is tied more to a character’s interior development rather than tangibly imparted to the reader. Black Paradox instead mostly thrives on general conceptual weirdness, letting Ito cut loose with body horror in time with the broadening of the plot.”

Also worth a look is Megan D.’s review of Happiness, a vampire manga by Shuzo Oshimi (Blood on the Tracks, Flowers of Evil). “Happiness is at its best when it tries to visualize the terror and confusion of a vampiric transformation against one’s will,” she observes, “but it’s hard to shake the feeling that from this point onward Oshimi was starting to rely on a story formula that was starting to get a little repetitious and questionable in its gender politics.”

The Manga Review: San Diego Comic-Con 2022 Edition

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This week’s edition of The Manga Review focuses primarily on San Diego Comic-Con. Before I get to the SDCC links, though, I wanted to talk about a New York Times article that appeared on July 23rd: “Comics That Read Top to Bottom Are Bringing in New Readers.” As you might guess from the headline, the article explores the growing popularity of Tapas and Webtoon, both of which are attracting substantial audiences, particularly among women under 25. The numbers are impressive; authors George Gene Gustines and Matt Stevens note that over 40 million women are active on the Webtoon platform, while a full two-thirds of Tapas’ users are women. I did a spit-take, however, when the authors boldly asserted that web comics were “tapping into an audience the industry had long overlooked: Gen Z and Millennial women.”

That statement ignores the fact many of these readers grew up with comics such as Sailor Moon and Fruits Basket as well as Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants and Dogman, Raina Telgemeier’s Smile, and Kazu Kibushi’s Amulet. Though DC Comics and Marvel are clearly important players in the comics market, Scholastic, VIZ, Kodansha, Yen Press, and Seven Seas serve a bigger readership than the Big Two, and have been doing so for over a decade. That point wasn’t lost on many of the people that Gustines and Stevens interviewed; creators and executives alike acknowledged the popularity of manga with American readers. The article’s authors, however, never acknowledge how much the old paradigm–of “Wednesday Warriors” buying floppies at the local comic ship–had changed before Tapas and Webtoon had a presence in North America. Anyone with vivid memories of visiting Borders or Barnes and Noble in the early 2000s could attest to the fact that girls were enthralled with manga, and viewed it as an appealing alternative to tights and capes.

OK… I’m hopping off my soapbox.

NEWS FROM SDCC 2022

Junji Ito’s Lovesickness beat out Chainsaw Man, Kaiju No. 8, Robo Sapiens: Tales of the Future, Spy x Family, and Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead for the title of Best U.S. Edition of International Material–Asia. I was surprised to see that this year’s field was so heavily focused on Shonen Jump titles; there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging popular series, but given how many other interesting projects were released in 2021, it seems odd that the nominating committee didn’t cast a wider net. [The Beat]

File this under About Damn Time: shojo manga pioneer Moto Hagio was finally inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame, joining Osamu Tezuka (2002), Goseki Kojima (2004), Katsuhiro Otomo (2012), Hayao Miyazaki (2014), and Rumiko Takahashi (2018). [The Beat]

Also taking home an award from SDCC was illustrator Hidetaka Tenjin, who won the Inkpot Award for his work on such franchises as Macross, Gundham, and Space Battleship Yamato. [Anime News Network]

No SDCC would be complete without Deb Aoki’s Best and Worst Manga Panel. She was joined by Brigid Alverson (ICv2, School Library Journal, Smash Pages), Siddarth Gupta (Manga Mavericks), Laura Neuzeth (YouTube, TikTok), Ryley Moore (The Omnibus Collector), and Jillian Rudes (mangainlibraries.com). Looking over their master list, I was relieved to see I wasn’t the only person who thought Crazy Food Truck was kind of terrible. [Mangasplaining]

Square Enix recently announced two new manga acquisitions: My Clueless First Friend, a manga about a gloomy girl and the perky boy who befriends her, and Daemons of the Shadow Realm, Hiromu Arakawa’s latest fantasy series. Both series will debut in spring 2023. [Anime News Network]

Seven Seas just added twelve new manga and light novels to its 2023 schedule, among them Yumi Tamura’s Do Not Say Mystery and a new edition of Wataru Yoshizumi’s shojo classic Marmalade Boy. [Seven Seas]

REVIEWS

Are you reading Helen Chazan’s work? Her writing is terrific, and may be the best thing that’s happened to The Comics Journal in an age. Her latest review focuses on Yamada Murasaki’s Talk to My Back,  a story about a middle-aged woman struggling with her role as housewife and mother. Chazan observers that Murasaki “confronts the reader with a woman’s life, a common woman’s inner world. Each chapter is a meditation on the sheer will it takes her housewife to survive under normalized abuse and oppressive demands, and the brief moments of beauty and humor that make survival possible.”

Also worth a look: Manga Bookshelf’s own Anna N. weighs in on Nina the Starry Bride, while the Anime UK News crew compile a list of their favorite CLAMP manga and anime.

Junji Ito’s No Longer Human

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Of all the famous works of literature to get the Classics Illustrated treatment, Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human is an odd choice. Its protagonist is Oba Yozo, a tortured soul who never figures out how to be his authentic self in a society that places tremendous emphasis on hierarchy, self-restraint, and civility. Over the course of the novel, he binges, gambles, seduces a string of women, joins a Communist cell, attempts suicide, and succumbs to heroin addiction, all while donning the mask of “the farcical eccentric” to conceal his “melancholy” and “agitation” from the very people whose lives he ruins.

Though the novel is filled with incident, its unreliable narrator and relentless interiority make it difficult to effectively retell in a comic format, as Junji Ito’s adaptation demonstrates. Ito’s No Longer Human is largely faithful to the events of Dazai’s novel, but takes Dazai’s spare, haunting narrative and transforms it into a phantasmagoria of sex, drugs, and death. In his efforts to show us how Yozo feels, Ito leans so hard into nightmarish imagery that the true horror of Yozo’s story is overshadowed by Ito’s artwork—a mistake, I think, as Ito’s drawings are too literal to convey the nuance of what it means to exist, in Peter Selgin’s words, in a state of “complete dissociation… yet still capable of feeling.”

In Ito’s defense, it’s not hard to see what attracted him to Dazai’s text; Yozo’s narration is peppered with the kind of vivid analogies that, at first glance, seem ideally suited for a visual medium like comics. But a closer examination of the text reveals the extent to which these analogies are part of the narrator’s efforts to beguile the reader; Yozo is, in effect, trying to convince the reader that his mind is filled with such monstrous ideas that he cannot be expected to function like a normal person. There’s a tension between how Yozo describes his own reactions to the ordinary unpleasantness of interacting with other people, and how Yozo describes the impact of his behavior on other people—a point that Ito overlooks in choosing to flesh out some key events in the novel.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Yozo’s brief affair with Tsuneko, a destitute waitress. After hitting rock bottom financially and emotionally, Yozo persuades her to join him in a double suicide pact. Dazai’s summary of what happens is shocking in its brevity and matter-of-factness:

As I stood there hesitating, she got up and looked inside my wallet. ‘‘Is that all you have?” Her voice was innocent, but it cut me to the quick. It was painful as only the voice of the first woman I had ever loved could be painful. “Is that all?” No, even that suggested more money than I had — three copper coins don’t count as money at all. This was a humiliation more strange than any I had tasted before, a humiliation I could not live with. I suppose I had still not managed to extricate myself from the part of the rich man’s son. It was then I myself determined, this time as a reality, to kill myself.

We threw ourselves into the sea at Kamakura that night. She untied her sash, saying she had borrowed it from a friend at the cafe, and left it folded neatly on a rock. I removed my coat and put it in the same spot. We entered the water together.

She died. I was saved.

As Ito recounts this event, however, Tsuneko’s death is caused by a poison so painful to ingest that she collapses in a writhing heap, eyes bulging and tongue wagging as if she were in the throes of becoming a monster herself. Yozo’s reaction to the poison, by contrast, is to plunge into a hallucinatory state in which a parade of ghostly women mock and berate him, an artistic choice that suggests Yozo feels shame and guilt for his actions—and a reading of Dazai’s text that makes Yozo seem more deserving of sympathy than he does in Dazai’s novel:

Throughout this vignette, Yozo’s contempt for Tsuneko creeps into the narrative, even as he assures the reader that she was the first woman he truly loved. Yozo’s disdain is palpable, as is evident in the way he off-handedly introduces her to the reader:

I was waiting at a sushi stall back of the Ginza for Tsuneko (that, as I recall, was her name, but the memory is too blurred for me to be sure: I am the sort of person who can forget even the name of the woman with whom he attempted suicide) to get off from work.

Only a few episodes capture the spirit of Dazai’s original novel, as when Yozo’s father gives an inept speech to a gathering of businessmen and community leaders. Ito skillfully cross-cuts between three separate conversations, allowing us to step into Yozo’s shoes as he eavesdrops on the attendees, servants, and family members, all of whom speak disparagingly about each other, and the speech. By pulling back the curtain on these conversations, Ito helps the reader appreciate the class and power differences among these groups, as well as revealing that this episode was a turning point for Yozo: the moment when he first realized that adults maintain certain masks in public that they discard in private. Though such a moment would undoubtedly trouble a more observant child—one need only think of Holden Caulfield’s obsession with adult “phoniness”—this discovery plunges Yozo into a state of despair, as he cannot imagine how anyone reconciles their public and private selves in a truthful way.

Ito also wisely restores material from Dazai’s novel that other adaptors—most notably Usamaru Furuya—trimmed from their versions. In particular, Ito does an excellent job of exploring the dynamic between Yozo and his classmate Takeichi, the first person who sees through Yozo’s carefully orchestrated buffoonery:

Just when I had begun to relax my guard a bit, fairly confident that I had succeeded by now in concealing completely my true identity, I was stabbed in the back, quite unexpectedly. The assailant, like most people who stab in the back, bordered on being a simpleton — the puniest boy in the class, whose scrofulous face and floppy jacket with sleeves too long  for him was complemented by a total lack of proficiency in his studies and by such clumsiness in military drill and physical training that he was perpetually designated as an ‘‘onlooker.” Not surprisingly, I failed to recognize the need to be on my guard against him.

As one might guess from this passage, Yozo’s terror at being discovered is another critical juncture in the novel. “I felt as if I had seen the world before me burst in an instant into the raging flames of hell,” he reports, before embarking on a campaign to win Takeichi’s trust by “cloth[ing his] face in the gentle beguiling smile of the false Christian.” Though Ito can’t resist the temptation to draw an image of Yozo engulfed in hell fire, most of Yozo’s fear is conveyed in subtler ways: a wary glance at Takeichi, an extreme close-up of Yozo’s face, an awkwardly placed arm around Takeichi’s shoulder:

What happens next in Ito’s version of No Longer Human, however, is indicative of another problem with his adaptation: his decision to add new material. In Dazai’s novel, Takeichi simply disappears from the narrative when Yozo moves to Tokyo for college, but in Ito’s version, Yozo cruelly manipulates Takeichi into thinking that Yozo’s cousin Setchan is in love with him—a manipulation that ultimately leads to Takeichi’s humiliation and suicide. That violent death is followed by a gruesome murder, this time prompted by a love triangle involving Yozo, his “auntie,” and Setchan, who becomes pregnant with Yozo’s child. Neither of these episodes deepen our understanding of who Yozo really is; they simply add more examples of how manipulative and callous he can be, thus blunting the impact of the real tragedy that unfolds in the late stages of his story.

Ito’s most problematic addition, however, is Osamu Dazai himself. Ito replaces the novel’s original framing device with the events leading up to Dazai’s 1948 suicide, encouraging us to view No Longer Human as pure autobiography through reinforcing the parallels between Dazai’s life and Yozo’s. And while those parallels are striking, the juxtaposition of the author and his fictional alter ego ultimately distorts the meaning of the novel by suggesting that the story documents Dazai’s own unravelling. That’s certainly one way to interpret No Longer Human, but such an autobiographical reading misses Dazai’s broader themes about the burden of consciousness, the nature of self, and the difficulty of being a full, authentic, feeling person in modern society.

VIZ Media provided a review copy. You can read a brief preview at the VIZ website by clicking here. For additional perspectives on Junji Ito’s adaptation, see Serdar Yegulalp‘s excellent, in-depth review at Ganriki.org, Reuben Barron‘s review at CBR.com, and MinovskyArticle’s review at the VIZ Media website.

JUNJI ITO’S NO LONGER HUMAN • ORIGINAL NOVEL BY OSAMU DAZAI • BASED ON THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY DONALD KEENE • TRANSLATED AND ADAPTED BY JOCELYNE ALLEN • VIZ MEDIA • RATED M, FOR MATURE AUDIENCES • 616 pp.

My Week in Manga: August 7-August 13, 2017

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My News and Reviews

I shifted around my usual posting schedule at Experiments in Manga a little last week so, instead of posting July’s Bookshelf Overload, I ended up featuring my review of Kazuki Sakuraba’s most recent work to be released in English, A Small Charred Face. The book is scheduled to be released in September (I received an advanced copy from Haikasoru for review purposes), and is definitely worth checking out. I’m not especially interested in vampire fiction, but A Small Charred Face makes for a very interesting contribution to the genre and I loved the queerness present in the story. Sakuraba is probably best known as the creator of Gosick, which I’ve been meaning to read, but my introduction to her work was through Red Girls: The Legend of the Akakuchibas.

Elsewhere online last week: Justin of The OASG posted a transcript of Four Hundred Pages of Manga Every Single Week, a roundtable discussion held in July which was sponsored by Kodansha Comics and featured three of Weekly Shonen Magazine‘s editors, including the editor-in-chief; Anime News Network interviewed Akira Himekawa, the creative team behind most of The Legend of Zelda manga adaptations; Viz Media made a some licensing announcements while at Otakon including RWBY by Shirow Miwa, Takane & Hana by Yuki Shiwasu, and The Young Master’s Revenge by Meca Tanaka; Also at Otakon, Sekai Project, which is still relatively new to manga publishing, announced the acquisition of Keika Hanada and Kanemune’s manga adaptation of The House in Fata Morgana.

Quick Takes

Clockwork Apple by Osamu Tezuka. I’ll admit, I managed to burn myself out on Tezuka for a bit, so I’ve managed to amass quite a stockpile of his recently-translated manga which I haven’t actually gotten around to reading yet. Clockwork Apple is a collection of eight short manga originally published between 1968 to 1973. While they aren’t directly related to one another, they do share a similar tone, were generally intended for an adult audience (mostly seinen, I believe), and can all broadly be described as speculative fiction. The stories in Clockwork Apple tend to be fairly dark, dramatic, and serious. The visual humor, breaking of the forth wall, and self-awareness frequently present in Tezuka’s other non-comedic works are nearly nonexistent in the Clockwork Apple. (I don’t think the Tezuka’s Star System was applied, either.) Tezuka was personally having a difficult time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so perhaps the tenor of these stories is partly a reflection of that. In general, I enjoyed the stories collected in Clockwork Apple even though the endings would sometimes be a little hit-or-miss or feel rushed. Each story would have at least one plot-altering twist, some had several, but occasionally those developments would come across as convenient rather than compelling.

Flesh-Colored HorrorFlesh-Colored Horror by Junji Ito. Most of Ito’s manga to have been translated into English are currently in print or have been recently reissued in a new edition and even more have been scheduled to be released in the near future. One of the few exceptions is Flesh-Colored Horror, the third and final volume in The Junji Ito Horror Comic Collection series released by ComicsOne. Currently, the volume can be a little difficult and expensive to find, but fortunately one of my local libraries had a copy. (I really hope to be able to find a reasonably-priced one of my own someday.) In addition to the titular story, Flesh-Colored Horror collects five of Ito’s other short horror manga. The six unrelated stories were originally published between 1988 and 1994 in Monthly Halloween, a shoujo manga magazine specializing in horror. Flesh-Colored Horror is a fantastic collection that is well-worth seeking out for either fans of Ito’s work or of weird horror in general. Ito has a way of starting with a simple and at times even mundane premise and twisting it into something truly strange and horrific. For whatever reason, while I greatly enjoy most of Ito’s work, I do find that I often prefer Ito’s older short manga over more recent collections; Flesh-Colored Horror continues that trend.

Giant Days, Volume 1Giant Days, Volume 1 written by John Allison and illustrated by Lissa Treiman and Whitney Cogar. I’ve been hearing good things about Giant Days for a while–the series has been nominated for multiple Eisner and Harvey Awards in the past, and several of my friends keep up with the comic–but I’m only getting around to reading it now. One thing that I didn’t realize about Giant Days, which initially started as a self-published webcomic before being picked up by Boom! Studios, is that it’s actually a spinoff of Allison’s earlier series Scary Go Round. I haven’t actually read Scary Go Round, but fortunately familiarity with that comic isn’t at all necessary to understand Giant Days. The comic largely follows three university students–Esther, Daisy, and Susan–who become close friends after living together in the same residence hall. The first volume seems to favor exploring the characters, their personalities, and relationships over having a strong overarching plotline. At times the comic feels somewhat disjointed and the scene changes can be rather abrupt, but the series has a good sense of humor and I do honestly like the characters. I think I would need to read a little more of Giant Days to really feel invested in their stories, but I greatly appreciate the inclusion of queer characters in the increasingly large cast.

My Week in Manga: April 3-April 9, 2017

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My News and Reviews

Last week at Experiments in Manga the winner of the Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid manga giveaway was announced. The post also includes a list of some of the manga available in print in English which feature dragons. Also posted last week was a guest review by my friend Jocilyn. She was inspired to write about Canno’s Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl, Volume 1, the most recent yuri manga to be released by Yen Press. As mentioned previously, I’m currently working on my own in-depth review of the first volume of The Girl from the Other Side: Siúil, A Rún by Nagabe. It looks like I should be on track to post it sometime next week.

Elsewhere online, Seven Seas has completely revamped its website, adding new features like browsing by genre, launching a newsletter, and so on. It looks great and what’s more, there will be a regular survey which provides readers an opportunity to give feedback and submit license requests. As part of the launch of the new website, Seven Seas also announced a few new licenses: Touki Yanagimi and Youhei Yasumura’s Anti-Magic Academy: The 35th Test Platoon, Shin Mashiba’s Yokai Rental Shop (I loved Mashiba’s Nightmare Inspector, so I’m really looking forward this one), and an omnibus of Fumiyo Kouno’s In This Corner of the World (Kouno is the creator of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms which is also excellent).

In other publishing news, some of Kodansha Comics digital-only titles were recently called digital-first, so there may yet be hope for print editions of some of the manga. I missed (or maybe forgot about) the initial announcement, but Titan Comics will be releasing Ravina the Witch? by Junko Mizuno in English later this year. (Ravina the Witch? was originally released in French in 2014.) In sadder news, Bruno Gmünder recently announced its bankruptcy (again). I’m not entirely sure what this will mean for the publisher’s past and future comics releases, including the Gay Manga line, but they might not stay in print long. (I’ve featured some of Bruno Gmünder’s releases here before; I’ll be sad to see them go if the publisher folds.)

As for a few of the interesting Kickstarters that I’ve discovered lately: Emily Cheeseman is raising funds to release the print edition of Gawain and the Green Knight, a beautiful webcomic that she’s been working on since 2015. I wasn’t previously familiar with the work of Elise Schuenke, but Living Space looks like it should be another great queer-themed comic. And speaking of queer-themed comics, the initial campaign for the Tabula Idem tarot anthology wasn’t successful but the creative team has revised and relaunched the project. Finally, anyone interested in Weird Al may be curious about Kelly Phillips’ comic memoir Weird Me about her experiences as the webmaster of a Weird Al fan site in her teens. (Weird Al’s music was a major touchstone for me growing up.)

Quick Takes

Dissolving ClassroomDissolving Classroom by Junji Ito. Lately there has been a resurgence in manga by Ito being released in English. In many cases they’ve actually been re-releases, but there have been a few newly-translated manga being published as well, Dissolving Classroom from Vertical Comics being the most recent example. I love Ito’s brand of horror manga and Dissolving Classroom was originally serialized in a josei magazine, so the volume was an obvious candidate for one of my most anticipated releases of the year. As expected, I thoroughly enjoyed the manga, but Dissolving Classroom didn’t end up leaving as strong of an impression on me as some of Ito’s earlier works. The loosely connected stories in Dissolving Classroom follow the demise of the people who meet Yuuma, a young man whose constant apologizing will literally make a person’s brain melt, and his incredibly creepy little sister Chizumi. Neither of the siblings are quite what they initially seem. Yuuma in particular comes across as a troubled but largely benign individual; very few people actually realize what’s going wrong before it’s too late. Dissolving Classroom is bizarre but certainly not the strangest manga that Ito has created. The visuals aren’t as shockingly memorable as some of Ito’s other series either, but they are still successfully disconcerting.

Everyone's Getting Married, Volume 1Everyone’s Getting Married, Volume 1 by Izumi Miyazono. While josei manga have recently become more common in translation (a trend that I would love to see continue), there still aren’t all that many to be found. I’ve generally enjoyed the josei manga that I’ve read in the past and I like to show my support for new releases, so I made a point to try Everyone’s Getting Married. Asuka is well-admired for her successful career, but what she really wants in life is to get married and become a housewife. When her boyfriend of five years unexpectedly dumps her, she suddenly finds herself looking for a new long-term relationship. That proves to be more difficult than she expected and unfortunately for her most likely candidate is Ryu, a man who has made it very clear that he has no interest in marriage. I’ve growing a little weary of high school romances, so I found Everyone’s Getting Married to be a wonderfully refreshing change of pace; I enjoyed reading about adults and their lives and relationships for once. I also like Asuka a great deal. She’s independent, knows what she wants out of life, and is willing to work hard for what is important to her. I’m looking forward to reading more about her and reading more of Everyone’s Getting Married.

Ghost in the Shell, Volume 1.5: Human-Error ProcessorGhost in the Shell, Volume 1.5: Human-Error Processor by Masamune Shirow. While I had previously read the first and second volumes of Ghost in the Shell, I had never actually read the manga’s third volume, something that I didn’t realize until Kodansha Comics recently re-released the entire series in a deluxe, hardcover edition. Even though it was the third volume of Ghost in the Shell to be collected and released, the events of Human-Error Processor take place between the first and second volumes (thus being numbered 1.5). The episodic chapters focus almost entirely Section 9 and the cases that group is investigating. A few intriguing new characters are introduced, but sadly the Major only makes the occasional guest appearance. Out of the three Ghost in the Shell volumes, Human-Error Processor is the most straightforward and easy to follow. While that’s something that I would generally welcome, the volume was somehow less interesting as a result even if it was more readable. As with the previous volumes in the series, some of the most interesting parts of the world-building in Human-Error Processor are actually only found in the footnotes instead of being directly incorporated into the manga.

NightlightsNightlights by Lorena Alvarez. It was the bold, vibrant colors and gorgeous illustrations of Nightlights that initially caught my attention. Alvarez is a Columbian illustrator; Nightlights is her first comic and my introduction to her work. Nightlights is about a little girl, Sandy, whose imagination takes flight at night. She gathers together small, mysterious, glowing lights and uses them to create anything that she can dream of. Come the day, she spends her time alone drawing what she has seen. It’s an innocent enough premise, but Nightlights can actually be pretty dark and some of the comic’s themes are fairly heavy. Nightlights could be described as an all-ages comic, but some younger readers might find it scary in places. There is also a depth and nuance to the comic and its narrative that only more mature readers will likely pick up on. Although the stories are notably different, Nightlights actually reminded me a little bit of the animated film The Secret of Kells which I likewise greatly enjoyed. Each in their own way the works are fairytale-like, telling stories about imagination, creation, and the unknown. Nightlights was a beautiful comic and I sincerely hope to see more work from Alvarez in the future.

Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life UnstrungGone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung by Min Kym. In 2010, Kym’s Stradivarius was stolen from her in a London cafe. The violin was an integral part of her identity, not just as a musician but as a person, and its loss was devastating. Her burgeoning career as a soloist came to a sudden halt. The violin was recovered three years later, but circumstances didn’t allow Kym to reclaim the instrument as her own. Ultimately she had to put it up for auction, losing it once again. In part, Kym’s memoir Gone was written in an attempt to process these traumatic events, rediscover who she is, and move forward with her life. Telling her side of the story she recounts growing up as a child prodigy–as the youngest daughter, her family’s devotion to her talent as a violinist was at odds with their South Korean heritage–her development as a musician, and her relationships with the Stradivarius and the people around her. Gone is an incredibly heartfelt and personal memoir but it can be somewhat discursive; Kym’s style of writing is very informal and at times even chaotic. Her voice as an author isn’t as clear as her voice as a violinist, but her passion and pain resonates throughout Gone. Complementing the release of Kym’s memoir is a companion album available from Warner Classics.

Dissolving Classroom

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The title of Junji Ito’s latest work is a nod to one of his seminal influences: Kazuo Umezu, author of such bat-shit classics as Cat-Eyed Boy, Orochi Blood, and, of course, The Drifting Classroom. Using the same techniques as Umezu — shocking imagery, gross-out humor, and far-out plot twists — Ito spins an elaborate yarn about the mysterious Azawa siblings. Yuuma, the handsome older brother, seems like a model teenager: he strenuously avoids conflicts with peers, and is unfailingly polite to his elders. Younger sister Chizumi, by contrast, is a hellion. With her kohl-rimmed eyes and Cheshire-cat sneer, she looks like a junior Harley Quinn as she gleefully stalks classmates, harasses her brother’s girlfriend, and vigorously disputes her brother’s claims of parental neglect.

Each chapter of the Dissolving Classroom hinges on the discovery that Yuuma and Chizumi are not who they seem to be. In “Dissolving Apartment,” for example, the Azawas’ new neighbors are initially impressed by Yuuma’s composure and maturity, and are moved to intervene when they overhear nightly rows at the Azawas’ unit. Though appalled by Chizumi’s crude pranks and bizarre comments, the neighbors see her behavior as evidence that Mr. and Mrs. Azawa are abusing their children, an impression confirmed by the parents’ secretive behavior. Only when the neighbors interrupt one of the family’s heated skirmishes do they realize the true parent-child dynamic in the Azawa home — knowledge that comes too late to save them from a gory fate.

Other stories approach the question of false appearances from a different angle. In “Dissolving Beauty,” for example, Yuuma behaves like a teenage girl’s fantasy of the perfect boyfriend: he’s attentive and reassuring, always ready to declare, “Your beauty is exceptional.” What his girlfriend doesn’t realize is that Yuuma’s flattery is toxic — that in appealing to her vanity and insecurity, Yuuma’s words are warping her into a grotesque caricature of her former self. And when I say grotesque, I mean it; the poor thing resembles Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz, right down to the boils and pointy chin.

Although Ito’s scenarios lack the visceral weirdness of Kazuo Umezu’s, Ito’s superior draftsmanship serves him well in Dissolving Classroom. Yuuma provides an instructive example: as Ito draws him, he’s the epitome of the nice young man, a blandly handsome canvas onto which adults and teens can project their own desires. His exaggerated gestures — downcast eyes, supplicating posture — initially register as desperation, as if he’s apologizing for a political scandal or an international diplomatic incident. Look closer, however, and we see a note of eroticism in the way Ito draws Yuuma’s face; those rolled eyes are more expression of ecstasy than shame, hinting at Yuuma’s real reason for bowing and scraping.

Ito seeds the narrative with other visual clues about what’s motivating Yuuma: demonic eyes peering through a veil of fog, a clandestine animal cemetery. When we finally learn Yuuma’s not-so-surprising secret, Ito pulls out all the stops. The climax is a molten flow of brains, limbs, and entrails that’s amusingly reminiscent of the Ark of the Covenant scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The effect is less scary than preposterous, but suggests that we’re all too willing to believe that a grand display of manners is evidence of good character, rather than an effort to deflect attention away from egregious behavior.

It’s only in the bonus story “Children of the Earth” that we see Ito at his most Umezian — the Ito familiar from Gyo, Uzumaki, and Tomie. In this brief vignette, parents frantically scour the woods for a missing kindergarten class. What they discover is genuinely unnerving: their children have transformed into something not quite human, not quite animal, and not quite vegetable, sitting uncomfortably between these three planes of existence. Ito’s nightmarish imagery harkens back to the yokai prints of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Utagawa Kuniyoshi in which ordinary creatures — catfish, tanuki — became monstrous through the addition of exaggerated human features. But “Children of the Earth” also has affinities with Umezu’s manga; like Umezu, Ito is good at excavating the subconscious, making us confront our most disturbing thoughts and dreams in Grand Guignol fashion.

If the rest of Dissolving Classroom doesn’t quite reach the same Umezian heights — or is that depths? — as “Children of the Earth,” it still makes a fine introduction to Ito’s work. It’s coherently plotted, crisply drawn, and provocative enough to make all that gory excess meaningful. Recommended.

DISSOLVING CLASSROOM • BY JUNJI ITO • VERTICAL COMICS • NO RATING (SUITABLE FOR TEENS 13 AND OLDER)

My Week in Manga: February 6-February 12, 2017

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My News and Reviews

Last week at Experiments in Manga I posted the Bookshelf Overload for January–it was kind of a strange month for manga and other media acquisitions for me, but it wasn’t as absurd as December so at least my wallet’s a little happier. I also managed to finish my draft for February’s in-depth review, so I should have that cleaned up and posted sometime later this week.

Last week I came across a few interesting things online related to queer manga, comics, and other media. Massive has now released Jiraiya’s Two Hoses in English, a manga telling the story of “The Greatest Couple,” characters who were initially designed for the company as part of its launch. (Massive has released Jiraiya’s Caveman Guu manga, too, which was subsequently collected in the excellent anthology Massive: Gay Erotic Manga and the Men Who Make It.)

I haven’t had a chance to actually listen to it yet, but the most recent ANNCast focused on LGBT representation in manga and anime with guests Erica Friedman, Jason Thompson, and Valerie Complex. Friedman also visited the University of Michigan back in January to discuss queer manga. The recording of her presentation Alt Manga, Queer Manga: Telling Our Own Stories is now available to watch on YouTube.

There were a few Kickstarter campaigns that caught my attention last week as well. First and foremost, Chromatic Press is raising funds to release the final volume of Lianne Sentar’s series Tokyo Demons in print, produce a revised edition of the first novel, as well as reprint the other books in the series. It isn’t a secret that I am a huge fan of the series, so I definitely want to see the project succeed. Tabula Idem is a great-looking tarot-themed queer comics anthology with an accompanying queer-themed major arcana tarot deck. I’m not very familiar with most of the artists involved, but Kaiju (whose comics I greatly enjoy) is contributing the cover illustration. Pamela Kotila has also launched a campaign to print the second volume of the webcomic Spidersilk. Though I haven’t actually read it yet, I recently picked up the first volume so this project seems to be aptly-timed.

Quick Takes

The Ancient Magus' Bride, Volume 4The Ancient Magus’ Bride, Volumes 4-6 by Kore Yamazaki. It’s been a little while since I’ve read The Ancient Magus’ Bride but that’s not because I don’t like the manga. In fact, it’s quite the opposite–The Ancient Magus’ Bride is actually one of my favorite series currently being released in English. I simply wanted to have a whole stack of volumes to read all at once. (Also worth noting: The first printing of Volume 6 is even accompanied by a special booklet with an additional comic!) Somehow, I had managed to forget just how much I enjoy The Ancient Magus’ Bride. I love its moody atmosphere and setting, beautiful artwork, and intriguing characters. Elias remains something of an enigma although parts of his past have now been revealed. He isn’t particularly happy about this development, though. Likewise, more is known about Chise, too, although she is still hesitant to share. The relationship dynamics in The Ancient Magus’ Bride are somewhat peculiar but remain compelling. Most of the characters in the manga are struggling with some sort of heartbreaking loneliness or feelings of isolation. To see them slowly drawing closer together, forming bonds of friendship, family, and love is immensely satisfying.

Mr. Mini MartMr. Mini Mart by Junko. Although the boys’ love manga Mr. Mini Mart was released in English first, my introduction to Junko’s work was through the series Kiss Him, Not Me. Because I was enjoying that series, I made a point to track down a copy of Mr. Mini Mart which for a time had gone out-of-print. (It’s more-or-less back in print again, but the manga seems to only be available directly from Juné Manga’s online store.) I forget why I initially passed on Mr. Mini Mart but I’m very glad that I finally got around to reading it. Mr. Mini Mart collects two boys’ love stories. Most of the volume is devoted to the titular “Mr. Mini Mart” but a short, unrelated one-shot manga “Young Scrubs” is included as well. It’s not nearly as good, though. “Mr. Mini Mart” is wonderful and surprisingly sweet. The story follows the high-school-aged Nakaba who, after an unfortunate incident in middle school, has been living as a shut-in. He gets finally gets out of the house when his uncle gives him a job at his store, but Nakaba has a difficult time getting along with his coworker Yamai and his abrasive personality. I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for a sensitive tough guy and it turns out that Yamai is an amazing example of one and is just a great person in general.

The Seven Princes of the Thousand-Year Labyrinth, Volume 1The Seven Princes of the Thousand-Year Labyrinth, Volume 1 written by Yu Aikawa and illustrated by Haruno Atori. I really wanted to like the first volume of The Seven Princes of the Thousand-Year Labyrinth more than I actually did. The basic premise is intriguing. A group of some of the kingdom’s most noteworthy, and in some cases most notorious, citizens wake up to find themselves trapped together in an elaborately booby-trapped castle. (The exception is the protagonist Ewan whose only distinguishing characteristics are his trusting nature, inherent kindness, and the fact that he’s from the kingdom’s most remote island.) The assumption is that whoever manages to survive the ordeal will become the kingdom’s emperor and reigning lords. There is a ton of potential in this set up, but The Seven Princes of the Thousand-Year Labyrinth simply didn’t work for me. Mostly I think it’s because the characters all come across as types rather than well-rounded individuals. What’s more is that they don’t even feel like they should all be a part of the same series; I found this lack of cohesiveness to be frustrating. The artwork is pretty, though, if not especially distinctive and there are plenty of plot twists, too.

TomieTomie by Junji Ito. Although uncommon, license rescues aren’t particularly rare, but Ito’s horror series Tomie is one of the very few manga to have been released in English by three different publishers. Most recently, Viz Media has collected the entire series in a single, massive tome with over seven hundred forty pages. The translation used is the same as the one in Dark Horse’s Museum of Terror series which I own, but I couldn’t resist the deluxe, hardcover treatment the volume received to match Viz’s other recent re-releases of Ito’s manga. Tomie was actually Ito’s award-winning professional debut and began serialization in 1987 in a shoujo magazine. The manga is largely episodic although there may be several chapters devoted to a single story arc and later stories sometimes make passing references to earlier ones. What ties the series together is the presence of Tomie, a beautiful young woman who is seemingly immortal. Time and again men fall desperately in love with Tomie and are eventually overcome by a desire to murder and dismember her. Not only does Tomie survive, she regenerates and multiplies, and so the horror continues. While not as mind-bendingly bizarre as some of Ito’s later works, Tomie is still weird, horrifying, gruesome, and grotesque.

Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu

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On the surface, Junji Ito’s Cat Diary is a gag manga. J-Kun–a lightly fictionalized version of the author–reluctantly agrees to let his fiancee bring two cats into their home: Yon, a black-and-white cat with sinister markings on his back, and Mu, a Norwegian forest cat with a cute face and a wicked bite. Each story depicts Yon and Mu doing normal cat things, from coughing up hairballs to resisting unsolicited human affection.

Readers familiar with Ito’s previous manga will get a chuckle at J-Kun’s over-the-top reactions to cat poop, scratched floors, and feather wands, as his grotesque facial expressions have been swiped from the pages of Gyo and Uzumaki. Surprisingly, these grimaces work just as well in the context of a domestic comedy, capturing the mixture of revulsion and love that cat behavior elicits. The uninitiated reader may also find these scenes amusing, if a bit excessive; surely a grown man realizes that cats can be jerks?

On a deeper level, however, Cat Diary is a meditation on human relationships. Though the ostensible plot focuses on J-Kun’s struggle to overcome his dislike of cats, the real story is Yon and Mu’s role in bringing J-Kun closer to his fiancee. J-Kun comes to love the cats–spoiler alert!–but the way in which he expresses those feelings demonstrates his journey from “me” to “we,” as his selfish concerns about the house give way to a shared sense of responsibility for the cats’ welfare. This human dimension of Cat Diary infuses it with a warmth that’s frequently missing from Ito’s work, and prevents the stories from reading like a collection of cat GIFs. (I can haz laffs now!)

On a totally shallow note, reading Cat Diary made me want to get my own Norwegian forest cat. I’m not sure if that’s an endorsement of Ito’s comedy chops, but it’s proof that he can draw the hell out of cute, furry things.

The verdict: You don’t need to be a cat person–crazy or otherwise–to enjoy this idiosyncratic manga, though a healthy respect for cats definitely helps.

Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu
By Junji Ito
Rated T, for readers 13+
Kodansha Comics, $10.99

This review originally appeared at MangaBlog on December 12, 2015.

Fragments of Horror

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Uncanny–that’s the first word that comes to mind after reading Junji Ito’s Fragments of Horror, an anthology of nine stories that run the gamut from deeply unsettling to just plain gross. Ito is one of the few manga-ka who can transform something as ordinary as a mattress or a house into an instrument of terror, as the opening stories in Fragments of Horror demonstrate. Both “Futon” and “Wood Spirit” abound in vivid imagery: apartments infested with demons, floors covered in eyes, walls turned to flesh, rooves thatched in human hair. Watching these seemingly benign objects pulse with life is both funny and terrifying, a potent reminder of how thin the dividing line between animate and inanimate really is.

Taut–that’s another word I’d use to describe Fragments of Horror. Each story is a model of economy, packing 60 or 70 pages of narrative into just 20 or 30. “Dissection Chan,” for example, explores the forty-year relationship between Tatsuro, a surgeon, and Ruriko, a woman who’s obsessed with vivisection. In a brief flashback to Tatsuro’s childhood, Ito documents the unraveling of their friendship, capturing both Ruriko’s escalating desire to cut things open and Tatsuro’s profound shame for helping her procure the tools (and animals) necessary for her experiments. Three or four years have been packed into this seven-page vignette, but Ito never resorts to voice-overs or thought balloons to explain how Tatsuro feels; stark lighting, lifelike facial expressions, and evocative body language convey Tatsuro’s emotional journey from curious participant to disgusted critic.

Not all stories land with the same cat-like tread of “Dissection Chan.” “Magami Nanakuse,” a cautionary tale about the literary world, aims for satire but misses the mark. The central punchline–that authors mine other people’s suffering for their art–isn’t executed with enough oomph or ick to make much of an impression. “Tomio • Red Turtleneck”  is another misfire. Though it yields some of the most squirm-inducing images of the collection, it reads like a sixteen-year-old boy’s idea of what happens if your girlfriend discovers that you’ve been stepping out on her: first she’s angry at you, then she’s angry at the Other Woman, and finally she forgives you after you grovel and suffer. (In Tomio’s case, suffering involves grotesque humiliation with a cockroach–the less said about it, the better.)

Taken as a whole, however, Fragments of Horror is testament to the fecundity of Ito’s imagination, and to his skill in translating those visions into sharp, unforgettable illustrations like this one:

ito_horror_interior

PS: I recommend pairing this week’s review with 13 Extremely Disturbing Junji Ito Panels, a listicle compiled by Steve Fox. (The title is a little misleading: the images are unsettling, but are generally SFW.)

Fragments of Horror
By Junji Ito
Rated T+, for older teens
VIZ Media, $17.99

This review originally appeared at MangaBlog on July 17, 2015.

The Best and Worst Manga of 2015

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After a two-year hiatus from blogging, I donned my critic’s cap again in 2015. I’ve enjoyed writing my quasi-weekly column, but composing a year-end list reminded me why I stepped off the reviewing treadmill in 2012: mediocre books! This year yielded a veritable bumper crop of so-so manga, titles that were competently executed but otherwise unmemorable thanks to an abundance of generic characters, cliché settings, and predictable plot twists; you’d be forgiven for feeling that you’d read many of 2015’s debuts before, even if the artists were new to the US market.

Lurking among the paint-by-number romances and boy-saves-world titles, however, were a few gems. I’ve done my best to highlight the titles that made me feel something, whether that feeling was love, hate, or a mixture of both. To that end, I’ve included my nominees for the worst manga of 2015 alongside the books that made me laugh and cry.

Yowamushi-Pedal-Volume-1Best New Series: Yowamushi Pedal
By Wataru Watanabe • Yen Press
You know the rap on sports manga: American readers won’t buy it, and don’t like it. Yowamushi Pedal might just change that, however, thanks to a story that plays well across the nerd-jock divide. Onoda, the hero, is a self-professed otaku whose weekly bike rides into Akihabara have transformed him into a secret Lance Armstrong clone. Though Onoda wants to revive his school’s anime club, his amazing hill-climbing skills and stamina get noticed by more seasoned riders, all of whom convince Onoda to join the cycling team. The series’ races are nail-biting, page-turning affairs, but it’s the in-between stuff that makes Yowamushi Pedal work. Onoda doesn’t just discover a new skill; he discovers a community of people who share his passion for riding and respect his talent. In short, Yowamushi Pedal is a coming-of-age story in which a bike becomes the nerdy hero’s vehicle—pun intended—for self-actualization.

One-Punch ManBest New Shonen Series: One-Punch Man
By ONE and Yusuke Murata • VIZ Media
One-Punch Man is the ultimate have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too manga. On the surface, it’s an affectionate spoof of shonen clichés that pokes fun at goofy costumes, over-the-top training sessions, and speech-prone villains. On a deeper level, however, One-Punch Man is a great adventure series about an ordinary but strong-willed individual who sets out to rid his city of monsters, only to discover that there’s a much greater threat to mankind than the lobster-men and were-lions that roam the streets. The result is a sincere, gut-bustingly funny manga that reads like a Silver Age superhero comic, splats and all. (Reviewed at Manga Blog on 6/12/15.)

Horimiya_cover1Best New Romance Manga: Horimiya
By Hero and Daisuke Hagiwara • Yen Press
Horimiya is one of 2015’s most pleasant surprises, a teen rom-com that avoids cliché situations by focusing on the characters’ lives outside school. At first glance, its lead characters look like opposites: Kyouko is the class queen, while Izumi is a quiet loner. When they bump into each other off campus, however, they quickly realize they have more in common than their carefully constructed identities would suggest–a realization that leads to friendship and flirtation. In less imaginative hands, Kyouko and Izumi’s budding romance would be subjected to endless tests–school plays, beach trips, hot transfer students–but the authors resist the urge to trot out these over-used scenarios, relying instead on more ordinary settings for comedic (and dramatic) grist. It’s the perfect antidote to the wacky misunderstandings that drive the plots of Cactus’ Secret, Special A, and a dozen similar titles.

Cat_DiaryBest New Gag Manga: Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu
By Junji Ito • Kodansha Comics
Draw a Venn diagram that shows the overlap between Junji Ito fans and cat lovers, and you’ve found the small but perfect audience for Junji Ito’s Cat Diary, a collection of anecdotes about Ito’s beloved pets Yon and Mu. Though the manga’s jokes explore familiar terrain, Ito’s exaggerated reaction shots are priceless, capturing the mixture of love and disgust that cats inspire in their owners. (Imagine Edvard Munch drawing a gag manga about cats, and you get the general idea.) Ito is refreshingly honest about the way animals change the dynamic between people, too; in some of the manga’s most memorable scenes, Ito and his fiancée compete fiercely for their cats’ affection, plying Yon and Mu with toys, treats, and cuddles. Though the prevailing tone is campy, Ito’s obvious affection for his cats helps prevents the Diary from becoming too arch. (Reviewed at Manga Blog on 12/12/15.)

ludwig_kansiBest Historic Title: Ludwig B.
By Osamu Tezuka • DMP, Inc.
Left unfinished at the time of Osamu Tezuka’s death, Ludwig B. is a fictionalized biography of Beethoven. Tezuka only completed two volumes, but oh, those two volumes! Tezuka draws evocative scenes of Beethoven at the keyboard, using striking visual metaphors to convey the sound of Beethoven’s music. Tezuka also does a good job of capturing the dynamic between Beethoven and his father, revealing the extent to which Johann’s drinking, gambling, and stage-parenting cast a long shadow over Beethoven’s adult life. Purists should note that Tezuka takes frequent liberties with the historical record, creating a mustache-twirling villain named Franz Kreuzstein to serve as a foil for the young, determined Beethoven. If you’re not offended by such creative license, however, Ludwig B. offers an interesting glimpse into Beethoven’s development as a composer, and Tezuka’s lifelong fascination with Beethoven.

planetesBest Reprint Edition: Planetes
By Makoto Yukimura • Dark Horse
Listen up, manga publishers: if you’re going to do a new edition of a fan favorite, Dark Horse’s two-volume omnibus of Planetes is a swell example of how to do it right. The story has a crisp new translation, full-color pages, and a bigger trim size that gives Makoto Yukimura’s artwork room to stretch out. Better still, the new edition collects more chapters in each volume, allowing newcomers to read far enough into Planetes for Yukimura’s episodic character studies to gel into a more coherent story about space travel and social inequality; by the time newbies reach the end of volume one, they’ll be hooked, too.

sakamotoBest Manga I Thought I’d Hate: Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto
By Nami Sano • Seven Seas
In theory, Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto is a one-note samba: the titular character is handsome, good at everything, and unfailingly logical in all situations. In practice, however, Haven’t You Heard? is the Goldberg Variations of gag manga, taking stock scenes and putting a bizarre twist on them. The secret? Sakamoto is just a little too perfect, behaving more like a well-programmed android than a flesh-and-blood person. His peculiar brand of sangfroid confounds enemies and admirers alike; no one can decide if he’s cool or crazy, or where his loyalties might lie, making it impossible to predict how he’ll respond to each new challenge. (Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 8/7/15.)

jojo_phantom_blood1Worst Manga I Thought I’d Love: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Part 1: Phantom Blood
By Hirohito Araki • VIZ Media
At the risk of becoming the Armond White of manga critics, I’m nominating Hirohito Araki’s bone-crunching, chest-thumping saga for Most Exhausting New Series of 2015. That’s because Phantom Blood is a prime example of all-caps theater, the sort of manga in which every word balloon is filled with emphatic punctuation, and every plot twist seems like the brainchild of six teenage boys hopped up on Mountain Dew. In small doses, this more-is-more approach to storytelling can be amusing, but in longer installments, the cumulative effect of so much narrative excess is numb resignation; I didn’t feel entertained so much as punched in the face. (Reviewed at Manga Blog on 5/22/15.)

mizuki_hitlerMost Disappointing Manga: Shigeru Mizuki’s Hitler
By Shigeru Mizuki • Drawn & Quarterly
Shigeru Mizuki’s Hitler is one of the artist’s lesser works, uncomfortably see-sawing between character study and history lesson in its efforts to show us the man behind the Third Reich. Mizuki’s signature blend of cartoonish figures and photo-realistic backgrounds have been deployed to powerful effect in Non Non Ba and Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths. Here, however, Shigeru’s hybrid style is a poor match with the subject; seeing Hitler reduced to a crude caricature makes it all too easy to view the book as a curiosity, rather than a serious meditation on evil. The virtual absence of the Holocaust is an even greater shortcoming; Shigeru Mizuki’s Hitler never grapples with the Fuhrer’s most disturbing legacy save for one blurry image of stacked corpses. Perhaps Mizuki felt the subject was too complex to explore in this biography, but it’s hard to imagine any dramatization of the Fuhrer’s life that fails to examine his virulent anti-Semitism.

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So what are other folks saying about 2015’s best titles? My Manga Bookshelf colleagues just posted their Pick of the Year, with Ash Brown posting a separate, more detailed run-down of his favorite titles at Experiments in Manga. At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Brigid Alverson has posted separate lists for her favorite new and continuing series.

The Manga Revue: Junji Ito’s Cat Diary

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2015 has been a banner year for Junji Ito. In April, VIZ re-issued Gyo, Ito’s ick-tastic classic. Two months later, VIZ introduced readers to Fragments of Horror, the first new Ito title to arrive in the US in a decade. That was soon followed by the stateside debut of Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu, a humorous anthology published by Kodansha Comics. I first heard about Cat Diary back in 2011, when Ryan Sands posted a few images at Same Hat! It sounded like something I’d like–I’m on record as being an animal sap–so I was delighted when Kodansha announced plans to release it this year. Here are my somewhat biased thoughts on Yon & Mu.

Cat_DiaryJunji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu
By Junji Ito
Rated T, for readers 13+
Kodansha Comics, $10.99

On the surface, Junji Ito’s Cat Diary is a gag manga. J-Kun–a lightly fictionalized version of the author–reluctantly agrees to let his fiancee bring two cats into their home: Yon, a black-and-white cat with sinister markings on his back, and Mu, a Norwegian forest cat with a cute face and a wicked bite. Each story depicts Yon and Mu doing normal cat things, from coughing up hairballs to resisting unsolicited human affection. Readers familiar with Ito’s previous manga will get a chuckle at J-Kun’s over-the-top reactions to cat poop, scratched floors, and feather wands, as his grotesque facial expressions have been swiped from the pages of Gyo and Uzumaki. Surprisingly, these grimaces work just as well in the context of a domestic comedy, capturing the mixture of revulsion and love that cat behavior elicits. The uninitiated reader may also find these scenes amusing, if a bit excessive; surely a grown man realizes that cats can be jerks?

On a deeper level, however, Cat Diary is a meditation on human relationships. Though the ostensible plot focuses on J-Kun’s struggle to overcome his dislike of cats, the real story is Yon and Mu’s role in bringing J-Kun closer to his fiancee. J-Kun comes to love the cats–spoiler alert!–but the way in which he expresses those feelings demonstrates his journey from “me” to “we,” as his selfish concerns about the house give way to a shared sense of responsibility for the cats’ welfare. This human dimension of Cat Diary infuses it with a warmth that’s frequently missing from Ito’s work, and prevents the stories from reading like a collection of cat GIFs. (I can haz laffs now!)

On a totally shallow note, reading Cat Diary made me want to get my own Norwegian forest cat. I’m not sure if that’s an endorsement of Ito’s comedy chops, but it’s proof that he can draw the hell out of cute, furry things.

The verdict: You don’t need to be a cat person–crazy or otherwise–to enjoy this idiosyncratic manga, though a healthy respect for cats definitely helps.

Reviews: In the mood for shojo? Megan R. of The Manga Test Drive has you covered with in-depth reviews of The Demon Prince of Momochi House, First Love Monster, L♥DK, and Requiem of the Rose-King. Comics Alliance contributor Tom Speelman reflects on the legacy of Naruto, one of the world’s most popular manga.

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Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu

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Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & MuCreator: Junji Ito
U.S. publisher: Kodansha
ISBN: 9781632361974
Released: October 2015
Original release: 2009

Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu was one of the manga releases I was most looking forward to in 2015. Junji Ito is primarily known for horror manga–his Uzumaki is one of my personal favorites in the genre–but in 2008 he had the opportunity to serialize an autobiographically-inspired manga based on his experiences living in a house with two cats. The result was Junji Ito’s Cat Diary, ultimately collected in a single, slim volume and published in Japan in 2009. The English-language edition of the manga released by Kodansha Comics in 2015 also includes the contributions made by Ito and his wife (Ayako Ishiguro) to the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake relief anthology Teach Me, Michael! A Textbook in Support of Feline Disaster Victims. I thoroughly enjoy Ito’s brand of unusual horror and I, too, happen to have the privilege of feline companionship, so I was very interested in Junji Ito’s Cat Diary. I expected it to be a manga that I would enjoy and I wasn’t disappointed; I absolutely loved it.

J-kun is the proud owner of a new house in pristine condition from floor to ceiling and he’s looking forward to living there with his soon-to-be wife A-ko. What he didn’t initially realize was that by inviting her to live with him he would also become host to two more guests: Yon and Mu. J-kun is convinced that Yon, one of A-ko’s family’s cats, is cursed. He’s a strange-looking feline with skull-like markings that would seem to confirm J-kun’s suspicions. Mu, on the other hand, is an adorable kitten with a pedigree and cute enough to melt even J-kun’s dog-loving heart. And so begins J-kun’s trials and tribulations as a keeper of cats, slowly falling under their spell as he grieves the loss of his perfectly-kept house. He warms up to both Yon and Mu, but they don’t quite exhibit the same amount of warmth in return, more often than not preferring A-ko’s company. But J-kun is determined–one day he, too, will enjoy Yon and Mu’s love and affection.

Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu, page 31Junji Ito’s Cat Diary is immensely entertaining. Ito has kept his signature style used when drawing horror manga and has applied it to a collection of stories that are closer to being gag manga. The illustrations can be intentionally grotesque and creepy, with an emphasis on J-kun’s exaggerated expressions as he reacts (and overreacts) to the events occurring in his household and the horrors of pet ownership. A-ko, too, is drawn in such a way that her disconcerting appearance adds to the atmosphere of horror in the manga. For the most part, the cats are simply cats (at least when J-kun isn’t hallucinating from lack of sleep); it’s the humans who come across as maniacal. Junji Ito’s Cat Diary looks like it should be a horror manga and has all of the genre’s visual stylings, but it really isn’t. The humor is even funnier because of this deliberate disconnect between the actual stories being told and how they are being portrayed.

As someone who tends to enjoy Ito’s work and as someone who tends to like cat comics, I was already in a position to particularly appreciate Junji Ito’s Cat Diary. It may certainly not work for everyone, though–the manga is a weird mix of horror and comedy, the grotesque and the adorable–but I loved it. In general, the stories in Junji Ito’s Cat Diary are less about Yon and Mu’s antics and more about J-kun’s reactions to their behavior and his changing relationships with the two cats. Yon and Mu are actually very normal as cats go; the humans in the manga are the ones who come across as eccentric and a bit odd. Junji Ito’s Cat Diary is hilarious but at the same time the manga maintains and oddly disconcerting and even ominous atmosphere. Ito simply excels at taking the mundane and transforming it into something truly devious and bizarre. I’m not sure, but perhaps I should be concerned by how much I can identify with the stories found in Junji Ito’s Cat Diary.

The Manga Revue: Fragments of Horror

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I’m too squeamish for horror movies–the blood alone is enough to send me screaming for the exits. But horror manga? That’s in my wheelhouse, as manga allows me to engage with the material as much–or as little–as I wish. Junji Ito’s work is largely responsible for showing me the possibilities of comic book horror; I don’t think I’ll ever forget the image of an enormous great white shark climbing a flight of stairs in pursuit of his next meal, or an entire village consumed by a voracious plague of… spirals. (It’s scarier than it sounds.) So when VIZ announced that they would be publishing a new collection of Ito stories, I knew I would buy it. But does Fragments of Horror deliver? Read on for the full scoop.

fragments_horror_vizFragments of Horror
By Junji Ito
Rated T+, for older teens
VIZ Media, $17.99

Uncanny–that’s the first word that comes to mind after reading Junji Ito’s Fragments of Horror, an anthology of nine stories that run the gamut from deeply unsettling to just plain gross. Ito is one of the few manga-ka who can transform something as ordinary as a mattress or a house into an instrument of terror, as the opening stories in Fragments of Horror demonstrate. Both “Futon” and “Wood Spirit” abound in vivid imagery: apartments infested with demons, floors covered in eyes, walls turned to flesh, rooves thatched in human hair. Watching these seemingly benign objects pulse with life is both funny and terrifying, a potent reminder of how thin the dividing line between animate and inanimate really is.

Taut–that’s another word I’d use to describe Fragments of Horror. Each story is a model of economy, packing 60 or 70 pages of narrative into just 20 or 30. “Dissection Chan,” for example, explores the forty-year relationship between Tatsuro, a surgeon, and Ruriko, a woman who’s obsessed with vivisection. In a brief flashback to Tatsuro’s childhood, Ito documents the unraveling of their friendship, capturing both Ruriko’s escalating desire to cut things open and Tatsuro’s profound shame for helping her procure the tools (and animals) necessary for her experiments. Three or four years have been packed into this seven-page vignette, but Ito never resorts to voice-overs or thought balloons to explain how Tatsuro feels; stark lighting, lifelike facial expressions, and evocative body language convey Tatsuro’s emotional journey from curious participant to disgusted critic.

Not all stories land with the same cat-like tread of “Dissection Chan.” “Magami Nanakuse,” a cautionary tale about the literary world, aims for satire but misses the mark. The central punchline–that authors mine other people’s suffering for their art–isn’t executed with enough oomph or ick to make much of an impression. “Tomio • Red Turtleneck”  is another misfire. Though it yields some of the most squirm-inducing images of the collection, it reads like a sixteen-year-old boy’s idea of what happens if your girlfriend discovers that you’ve been stepping out on her: first she’s angry at you, then she’s angry at the Other Woman, and finally she forgives you after you grovel and suffer. (In Tomio’s case, suffering involves grotesque humiliation with a cockroach–the less said about it, the better.)

Taken as a whole, however, Fragments of Horror is testament to the fecundity of Ito’s imagination, and to his skill in translating those visions into sharp, unforgettable illustrations like this one:

ito_horror_interior

PS: I recommend pairing this week’s review with 13 Extremely Disturbing Junji Ito Panels, a listicle compiled by Steve Fox. (The title is a little misleading: the images are unsettling, but are generally SFW.)

Reviews: Sean Gaffney reads Pandora in the Crimson Shell and Magika: Swordsman and Summoner so that you don’t have to. At Women Write About Comics, Amanda Vail compares the light novel and manga versions of The Devil is a Part-Timer!

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Gyo: The Death-Stench Creeps

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Gyo: The Death-Stench CreepsCreator: Junji Ito
U.S. publisher: Viz Media
ISBN: 9781421579153
Released: April 2015
Original run: 2002

Gyo: The Death-Stench Creeps is a short, two-volume horror manga series created by Junji Ito. Originally published in Japan in 2002, Gyo has had several English-language releases by Viz Media. It was first translated between 2003 and 2004, a slightly updated second edition was released between 2007 and 2008, and most recently, published in 2015, was the deluxe hardcover omnibus. In addition to Gyo, the omnibus also collects two of Ito’s short horror manga: “The Sad Tale of the Principal Post” and “The Enigma of Amigara Fault.” The deluxe edition of Gyo is very similar in design to the recent omnibus of Ito’s manga Uzumaki; the two volumes look great on the shelf together. Uzumaki was actually my introduction to Ito’s work, and I consider it to be one of the best horror manga that I’ve read. Despite Gyo having been released in English three times, and despite the fact that I’ve been meaning to read more of Ito’s manga, the series’ deluxe omnibus is actually the first that I’ve read since Uzumaki.

While vacationing in Okinawa, Tadashi and his girlfriend Kaori witness the harbinger of what will eventually become a plague overrunning the entirety of Japan—a small, rotting fish walking on land with what appear to be mechanical legs. Accompanying it is an overwhelming and nauseating stench. Soon, countless fish and other sea creatures begin streaming out of the ocean. The only things that they have in common are the bizarre appendages and the sickening smell. Kaori and Tadashi cut their vacation short and return to Tokyo, but Kaori in particular is traumatized by the events in Okinawa and soon the creatures begin to be found in the city as well. No one knows where the walking fish originated or how they evolved; of much greater concern is the death and disease caused by their presence on land. And things are only getting worse with the passage of time.

Gyo: The Death-Stench Creeps, page 66The back cover of the omnibus describes Gyo as Ito’s “creepiest masterpiece of horror manga ever.” Admittedly, some of the artwork in Gyo is fantastically creepy, not to mention gruesome and grotesque. Ito is an extremely skilled illustrator, creating images that are horrifying and nightmare-inducing. And as a whole, Gyo can be exceptionally gross. However, the manga’s story ends up being so utterly ridiculous that I would be hard pressed to call it a masterpiece, especially when compared to his earlier work Uzumaki. Whereas Uzumaki is surreal and bizarre, Gyo is so absurd as to be ludicrous, and only increasingly so as the manga progresses. I simply can’t take Gyo seriously; I can only read the series as a comedy, whether or not it is actually intended as such. The manga is perhaps closer to being a cult classic, which I suppose might make it a masterpiece of a different sort, but that’s something that could be argued either way. If nothing else, though, Gyo is a brilliantly outrageous spectacle.

Gyo is certainly not a manga that will appeal to every reader, even those who are already fans of horror manga. Though disconcerting and disgusting, especially the illustrations, the plot of Gyo is too silly to be truly terrifying. Taken alone, the art is superb, but the ridiculous nature of the story creates a weird disconnect. However, I can’t deny that I was entertained by the progressively over-the-top, illogical, and random developments in the manga: sentient gas, a circus out of the middle of nowhere, characters who are oddly oblivious or overly accepting of what is going on around them, and so on. (Though, it is rather sweet how Tadashi sticks beside Kaori through to the very end.) Assuming that one can find it palatable to begin with, Gyo is a very strange manga that is difficult to look away from as Ito presses further and further into territory that is beyond believing. I kept turning the pages to see just how far he would be able to take things. Gyo may very well be one of those manga that’s so good simply because it’s so bad; whether that’s deliberate or not, I’m not sure.